The collector of the last words

Translation: RAFAEL PIOT

Year of volume publication (originally in Italy): 2008

Valoración: Advisable

• Of “for difficult spots” and “an ordinary man” would highlight his emotional backgrounds. I liked how, despite the simplicity of his approaches, the author keeps a couple of plot turns and allows the reader to get his own conclusions about certain events.
• From “Moses, the beggar” and “Circle” I have appreciated his sense of humor, but above all he would highlight the psychological portrait they make of their protagonist tragicomics. And it is that the first of the two obsessively questions his piety, chains thoughts about guilt, sin and faith, and initiates an internal dialogue with God full of Congoja and contradictions. On the other hand, the second, tired with his marriage, his wife and son, descends to madness after several people offer a gum, because he imagines that his breath smells bad.

• In “Mr. Chichifoi’s Sunday”, the metaphor of rabbits helps to articulate the idea that the protagonist is a kind of God still now that he is retired, as already, in a way, when he was a goalkeeper in a block of floors for single.
• “Five, five and a half” impacts his way of narrating how a platonic love leads his protagonist to harass his beloved, sabotage his academic career, distance his father and falsify documents. Some of her passages have seemed masterful, such as this one: “Nor do she know how much I loved her! Neither my mother, nor my father, nor a whole; And it is possible that not even myself knows everything. Poor dad has never known anything about me. He wanted from the heart to make me a doctor, to return to the town and take care of the old age of his varicose veins and kidneys (…). I was (…) the decay of his life. (…) All my life helped me and I, on the other hand, all my life lied, maybe because I always felt that I didn’t want to help me, but his own old age; That was not whom I wanted, but feared his diseases. God has him in his glory, because he was a Father like the other fifteen million parents in Romania. » (79)
• “Gargajos collection” shows the very hard process of maturation of a boy with an enviable forcefulness.
• Although at times it costs to understand what we are suffering so subtly telling us in “playing darkness”, it is worth diving into the oblique and enigmatic microcosm of a girl, because our interpretive efforts will be generously corresponded.

• “The monkey” and “the lamp with hat” know how to capture the child voice and have sparkling dialogues. They tell very human stories with great tenderness and delicacy, and although they focus on family relationships, many other complementary issues also address.
• “Uncle Mihai and God, the comrade” is the story of the whole that refers more directly to communism (theme, like the Christian religion, less but recurring in this volume), to the role that the individual plays in him and the role of the State by investing in social projects.